Month: July 2018

In the previous article, we wrote enough Metal code to get the spinning silhouette of a teapot on the screen, but that still leaves a lot to be desired as far as a “modern” app is concerned. In this article, we’ll further flesh out the app and introduce lighting, materials, texturing, and managing multiple objects with scene graphs.

Getting Started

This article is a quick introduction to how to use the Metal, MetalKit, and Model I/O frameworks in Swift. If you know your way around UIKit or Cocoa development, you should be able to follow along for the most part. Some things like shaders and matrices will be foreign to you, but you can learn them as you go about exploring Metal on your own. The purpose here is to give you a template to build on.

First things first. Use Xcode to create a new project from the iOS Single View App template. Add import MetalKit at the top of the ViewController.swift file. We could use the Game template instead and have some of the boilerplate written for us, but writing it out long-hand will give us more of an appreciation for the moving parts. The Game template also includes a lot of moving parts that get in the way of understanding the basics.